The Man of Ross

Few people have made as great a mark on a town as John Kyrle did on Ross on Wye. Born at Dymock, John Kyrle (1637 - 1724) was the son of Walter and Alice Kyrle. He studied Law at Oxford, but did not qualify as a lawyer, and after his father’s death in the 1650s he inherited the timber-framed house at Ross.

Settling there in 1660, he devoted the rest of his life to philanthropic works. Kyrle introduced a public water supply to the town and laid out the Prospect Gardens. He also reconstructed and added pinnacles to the unsafe 14th century spire of the Church of St. Mary and gave it a magnificent tenor bell. He sponsored the causeway to the nearby Witton Bridge and set up funds for needy local children to attend school. The poet Alexander Pope praised him as the ‘Man of Ross’, the name by which he has been known ever since. John Kyrle lived in a half-timbered Elizabethan house opposite the Market House, which still stands but is now divided into two shops. Behind one of them is an old garden laid out to Kyrle’s original design incorporating a swan motif made of horses’ teeth and a 12 inch high maze of box hedges.

Kyrle lived modestly as a bachelor on an income, it is said, of £500 per year. Apart from Kyrle’s charitable works and deeds which you will discover as you follow the step by step guide to the walk, he also settled disputes, supported the schools, tended the sick and helped the poor. His public-mindedness also extended to beautifying the town and its surrounding landscape. At the great age of 87, John Kyrle died and was buried in the chancel of St. Mary’s Church in Ross.

His life and good works were celebrated by the poet Alexander Pope in his Moral Essays written in 1732. Since then many places in the town have taken his name. John Kyrle’s House stands opposite the Market House. For a period after Kyrle’s death it became an Inn ‘The King’s Arms’ until it was closed in 1805.